Report Bad Drivers From Your iPhone With DriveMeCrazy

The idea behind DriveMeCrazy, a new iPhone app from the founder of Shazam, is both at the same time interesting, and flawed. We’ve all experienced incidents on the road – bad drivers, aggressive or intimidatory driving, disregard for road rules or blatant law breaking. The developer, DriveMeCrazy Inc hopes that this app will help to level the playing field by allowing you to report these negative motorists.

DriveMeCrazy’s features are basically divided into those for reporting bad drivers, and those for contacting “cute or courteous” drivers. If you come across a bad driver in your travels, you can report that driver to the authorities and insurance companies via the app interface. You anonymously ‘flag’ a driver by simply speaking the license plate number out loud into the phone, or by entering it in manually. You can send your flags out to your social network via Facebook or Twitter and there is also a special page for ‘venting’ about a particular driver with other DriveMeCrazy users.

The other side of the app is reserved for those drivers at the other end of the spectrum – those you took a fancy to through the driver-side window. DriveMeCrazy lets you send a voice message or a text to these drivers, and if they have the app installed, they will receive your message.

The app aims to crowd-source traffic violations to curb dangerous driving, and tracks user UDID’s so there is some way to detect multiple malicious flags (i.e against an ex, coworker, boss etc). However, there is still no way to differentiate a legitimate flag from an illegitimate one. DriveMeCrazy is a location-based app, so reporting someone on the other side of the country won’t work – but you can still report the car next to you for no reason.

At the same time, the likelihood that anyone you ever flag as being ‘cute’ will actually 1) have an iPhone and 2) have DriveMeCrazy installed and 3) regularly check the app – means there will be little practical use for this part of the app.

Bottom Line: An innovative idea to curb bad driving, DriveMeCrazy would be improved by focusing on just the bad (or the good) driving element, rather than trying to combine the two.

DriveMeCrazy is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.1.3 or later. A small expedite fee was paid by the developer to speed up the publication of this review.